Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws?
Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit.
To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.
So far it sounds good but after the dust settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk.
The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.
It's nothing new for the EU. They tried to pass software patents through a meeting of agricultural ministers. The polish delegation saved us that time but later the industrials got their wish anyway.
I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to correct for bad legislation much faster.
>They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.
This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck.
Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm.
But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.
It's a lot easier to do something than it is to stop people from doing something. Usually to prevent actions you need total control or strong incentives. This is the same dynamic as browser feature development. Adding things is easy. Preventing additions is hard. We end up saying yes to things that disadvantage most people.
> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.
I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here.
The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei).
It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen.
If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.
> bring the thing again this time with another name
There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.
This is the main reason that direct democracy is a better system: you can lobby all you want, but it ain't going to happen unless the people want it too.
> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.
I think the issue is of complexity and energy. The world and a lot of these problems are often extremely complex and there are no optimal solutions. There is always slap, noise, and limits. Many of these things are also hard to understand and take a lot of time and energy to actually understand what is even seemingly simple.
But the cost I believes to a lot of apathy. For example, how difficult is it to switch people to tools like Firefox or Signal? The noise is quite high and non-experts will not know how to navigate this. Even mentioning these two tools will cause controversy on sites like this with people pointing out the imperfections. But the truth is that these always exist (same thing politicians exploit) and the complaints just make non-experts confused. Yeah, there are things better than Signal but there's no tool that is better for the masses and communication systems rely on people being on the same platform. The network effect.
Which getting into the network effect is the quite disappointing part of many things in politics. We have a lot of people that operate under the notion "if you don't like it, then don't use/participate/whatever." But this is not a realistic notion. As an example, I've used Firefox for over a decade and a lot has been to simply push against the Chrome domination. But that happened anyways and the thing is that Chrome still took over and Google has a lot of control over the internet. The truth is the differences in browsers isn't really that large, but we become quite passionate about defending our decisions. The same is exactly true for political concepts. We can point out flaws in other systems/ideas but do not weigh these equally when they are the thing we chose vs the other option. But the entire landscape is exceptionally complex and there are no optimal solutions. Until we can at least remember that it's difficult to solve anything.
Exactly, and this is why the people in the thread saying, "don't worry, it won't pass" are not serious.
In a year or two, they'll raise it again, except then they'll know what the opposition thinks and what arguments resonated with the public, so they'll be smarter.
"They can't bring it up again for five years!" -- also not serious. They can resurrect the least controversial parts and call it something else.
The only answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.
Meanwhile, other groups of people you might find insane are also devoting their lives to shouting down changes you actually support or find critical. The lesson for even the most faithful elected representative is that the signal/noise ratio of public opinion is too unreliableto take seriously.
It's about time we have some standing voted directives originating with the people. Perhaps an AI could verify law proposals and shoot them down if the citizenry oposes it. Properly tallied and percentaged of course.
> To sway European public opinion, however, the European Commission went even further. X’s Transparency Report shows that the European Commission also used ‘microtargeting’ to ensure that the ads did not appear to people who care about privacy (…) and eurosceptics
Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.
I recently discovered that US Congressional votes used to be "anonymous" in the sense that the vote COUNTS would be public but who voted for what was kept secret.
The voting was then changed so that actual votes where made public in favor of more transparency. While it did indeed make the vote more open and visible to the public, it had the effect of showing lobbyists exactly which members of Congress were voting for and against the lobbyists' interests. This in turn led to funding going to the pro-lobby Congress members and the vicious cycle accelerates.
As a post script, I forget if it's in the video or somewhere else but experiments in real political bodies (I believe it was the Italian parliament) with both a public and secret vote for the same legal bill led to two completely different outcomes.
The European parlement is probably the best thing that we have in Europe, most good things and new rights come from there.
At the opposite, the European Commission is probably the worse that we can have. It is totally corrupted (see the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and co) or at least morally corrupted by lobbies. And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way.
Good things to wonder is why America got shared access to all financial transactions of European citizens but the opposite is not true.
Nothing new for the EU commission. They are the least democratic of the EU bodies. The name the have (the commission, from the soviet union commissars) is very appropriate and the do live up to it. Just look how they attack every country that has the audacity to elect forces opposed to their paymasters (that mostly include German interest groups, and Russia by proxy). Trying to redefine words like "rule of law" to hit for example Poland(ruled by a party opposed to EPP, the ruling party in the EU) while 100% ignoring horrible corruption in Bulgaria that is aligned with them. No reaction whatsoever to huge corruption in the Court of Justice of the EU (the Court of Justice is the opposite of the rule of law at the moment, but it's a long story). All while trying to force more power to itself against treaties, get rid of veto rights, and push through things like this law. Sad really, because the EU itself was a great idea, but everything can be corrupted.
I would be interested in learning the thoughts of those who have thought deeply about the role of anonymity in democracy.
I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?
My interest is not one sided. I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. But I also have an intuition that institutional privacy for a government is harmful to democracy. I think most would argue that a reasonable amount of governmental privacy is important to national security. I tend to favor the bare minimum. Most people I know disagree with me on that. I enjoy exploring both sides and trying to move beyond intuition for my position.
Any links or references to reasoned arguments on all sides are appreciated.
That is so awful, Britain is trying on this sort of thing too saying it is to protect children. However they don't try and support citizen organiztions that do a good job there, and have been involved in actions showing it is much lower priority than control. Has anyone ever done a study even of how much benefit it would have in countering paedophiles even ignoring any loss from the general control freakery and general loss of freedom? I think it would be quite ineffective compared to the citizen organizations countering paedophilia. It's just trying to emulate China in conttrolling the population.
> The most important one should be: Every citizen is free to express his opinion.
And if their opinion is that, all Jews are subhuman and have to be exterminated? (real life example)
Most EU countries have "hate speech" laws explicitly banning hate speech such as Nazis and Anti-Semites. Nobody sheds any tears over their opinions being restricted, and nobody should. Debating with pidgeons doesn't work.
There is actually no democracy in the European Union, nor in any of its state members. There is no power separation, the executive branch and the legislative branch is all one that is trying to control everything.
You can see it with all these laws that bypass the judiciary system when censoring content on the internet. It's not a judge who decides to ban or not Russia Today or Twitter.
This is basically Michels' iron law of oligarchy unfolding under our eyes. They create the laws, they execute them and they punish if you don't follow.
I first heard about this push on a VPN’s website nearly a year ago. What worries me more is how little this is actually reported in media. How can people protest against something that they haven’t even heard of?
I think it’s this hegemonic power to undermine fundamental rights of not only europeans clandestinely through convoluted bureaucracy and media suppression and under the pretext of child protection, even more harrowing than the proposal itself. It is absolutely important to fight against child porn and other criminal activities, but mass surveillance is not the answer.
Tax collection requires surveillance. But surveillance is usually skipped on people you exempt from taxes anyway. because you can’t nail them for tax evasion if there are no taxes to evade.
There is no Democracy in Europe. In order to have a Democracy you have to have free speech so that ideas can be freely exchanged with the good ideas beating out the bad ones at the ballot box. In Europe, speech is controlled by hate speech laws and government censorship thus the vote is also controlled and thus elections are not free thus there is no Democracy in Europe. This lack of Democracy is coming to a head in Germany where the rising AfD party is being spied on and physically assaulted by the German secret police controlled by the ruling coalition lead by the SPD.
America is also experiencing similar problems of censorship and hate speech laws, the difference is in America censorship and hate speech laws are banned by the First Amendment and thus there's at least a chance that the Supreme Court can restore Democracy. In Europe, there is no hope of Democracy being restored because there is no legal protection of the freedom of speech.
To those of you on this site who get so sanctimonious about how wonderful GDPR is at mitigating the surveillance conducted by the big tech giants (most of them American), here's a wonderful example of how your cherished EU government uses both carrots and sticks. It's apparently not so much that the EU fights for individual privacy, it just doesn't like to have external competitors surveil the shit out of people without its say-so.
The pressure to implement this both in EU and in five eyes countries comes IMHO from the US. In the EU itself there are no structures that would profit from this.
What they are even trying to achieve? A criminal can always use an e2e messaging system. Even if they ban the systems (such as Signal) that don’t employ these measures, it’s just a matter of using a VPN.
You can't have democracy if people are persecuted for their voting preferences, and with total surveillance a bad government could identify ahead of time people who planned to vote against it and punish them.
In the balance of power between citizens and the government they somewhat begrudgingly delegate control of their lives to, democracy and surveillance are directly opposite.
To have a well-working democracy, you need well-informed citizens. Disinformation undermines that. In this case the disinformation serves the purpose of gathering support for surveillance laws.
So much for the beacon of privacy! At least we got those sweet GDPR cookie banners. It's not all that bad.
And with this new law, we won't have to worry about Meta selling our data, the governments will take care of that.
It's looks like history seems to repeat itself. It's a just a matter of time.
Social credit, the Ministry of Truth and whatever else they can think of, that's just around the corner.
[+] [-] irusensei|2 years ago|reply
Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit.
To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.
So far it sounds good but after the dust settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk.
The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsign|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmoney|2 years ago|reply
This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck.
Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm.
But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.
[+] [-] usea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _a_a_a_|2 years ago|reply
I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here.
The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei).
It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen.
If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.
[+] [-] jjav|2 years ago|reply
There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.
[+] [-] bboygravity|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
I think the issue is of complexity and energy. The world and a lot of these problems are often extremely complex and there are no optimal solutions. There is always slap, noise, and limits. Many of these things are also hard to understand and take a lot of time and energy to actually understand what is even seemingly simple.
But the cost I believes to a lot of apathy. For example, how difficult is it to switch people to tools like Firefox or Signal? The noise is quite high and non-experts will not know how to navigate this. Even mentioning these two tools will cause controversy on sites like this with people pointing out the imperfections. But the truth is that these always exist (same thing politicians exploit) and the complaints just make non-experts confused. Yeah, there are things better than Signal but there's no tool that is better for the masses and communication systems rely on people being on the same platform. The network effect.
Which getting into the network effect is the quite disappointing part of many things in politics. We have a lot of people that operate under the notion "if you don't like it, then don't use/participate/whatever." But this is not a realistic notion. As an example, I've used Firefox for over a decade and a lot has been to simply push against the Chrome domination. But that happened anyways and the thing is that Chrome still took over and Google has a lot of control over the internet. The truth is the differences in browsers isn't really that large, but we become quite passionate about defending our decisions. The same is exactly true for political concepts. We can point out flaws in other systems/ideas but do not weigh these equally when they are the thing we chose vs the other option. But the entire landscape is exceptionally complex and there are no optimal solutions. Until we can at least remember that it's difficult to solve anything.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
In a year or two, they'll raise it again, except then they'll know what the opposition thinks and what arguments resonated with the public, so they'll be smarter.
"They can't bring it up again for five years!" -- also not serious. They can resurrect the least controversial parts and call it something else.
The only answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|2 years ago|reply
Of course, they'll always have an interest in enriching themselves and their friends
[+] [-] BHSPitMonkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] montagg|2 years ago|reply
This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NoZZz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|2 years ago|reply
Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.
[+] [-] alexpotato|2 years ago|reply
The voting was then changed so that actual votes where made public in favor of more transparency. While it did indeed make the vote more open and visible to the public, it had the effect of showing lobbyists exactly which members of Congress were voting for and against the lobbyists' interests. This in turn led to funding going to the pro-lobby Congress members and the vicious cycle accelerates.
This video lecture goes into much more detail about the process and the impact that this had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg
As a post script, I forget if it's in the video or somewhere else but experiments in real political bodies (I believe it was the Italian parliament) with both a public and secret vote for the same legal bill led to two completely different outcomes.
[+] [-] m3at|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greatgib|2 years ago|reply
At the opposite, the European Commission is probably the worse that we can have. It is totally corrupted (see the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and co) or at least morally corrupted by lobbies. And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way.
Good things to wonder is why America got shared access to all financial transactions of European citizens but the opposite is not true.
[+] [-] tgv|2 years ago|reply
The corrupt politician in question, Eva Kaili, was not a vice-president of the EC, but of the European Parliament. She was elected.
That sort of undermines your argument.
[+] [-] garaetjjte|2 years ago|reply
European Parliament literally does not have right of initiative.
[+] [-] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeopinion|2 years ago|reply
I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?
My interest is not one sided. I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. But I also have an intuition that institutional privacy for a government is harmful to democracy. I think most would argue that a reasonable amount of governmental privacy is important to national security. I tend to favor the bare minimum. Most people I know disagree with me on that. I enjoy exploring both sides and trying to move beyond intuition for my position.
Any links or references to reasoned arguments on all sides are appreciated.
[+] [-] dmcq2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackandthink|2 years ago|reply
The most important one should be: Every citizen is free to express his opinion.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
[+] [-] RandomLensman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_w|2 years ago|reply
Any nation can have stronger free speech protections if it chooses to and the EU bodies can’t prevent it.
Your argument is nonsense.
[+] [-] sofixa|2 years ago|reply
And if their opinion is that, all Jews are subhuman and have to be exterminated? (real life example)
Most EU countries have "hate speech" laws explicitly banning hate speech such as Nazis and Anti-Semites. Nobody sheds any tears over their opinions being restricted, and nobody should. Debating with pidgeons doesn't work.
[+] [-] peoplefromibiza|2 years ago|reply
you are, but if you commit a crime in doing it you go to trial.
which is fair.
edit: libel is a crime punishable by the law, everywhere in the west. Doesn't mean you are forbidden to say what you want.
democracy without a justice system as a counter power is not democracy as we intend them in modern era.
[+] [-] torcete|2 years ago|reply
You can see it with all these laws that bypass the judiciary system when censoring content on the internet. It's not a judge who decides to ban or not Russia Today or Twitter.
This is basically Michels' iron law of oligarchy unfolding under our eyes. They create the laws, they execute them and they punish if you don't follow.
[+] [-] my4ng|2 years ago|reply
I think it’s this hegemonic power to undermine fundamental rights of not only europeans clandestinely through convoluted bureaucracy and media suppression and under the pretext of child protection, even more harrowing than the proposal itself. It is absolutely important to fight against child porn and other criminal activities, but mass surveillance is not the answer.
[+] [-] naveen99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jscipione|2 years ago|reply
America is also experiencing similar problems of censorship and hate speech laws, the difference is in America censorship and hate speech laws are banned by the First Amendment and thus there's at least a chance that the Supreme Court can restore Democracy. In Europe, there is no hope of Democracy being restored because there is no legal protection of the freedom of speech.
[+] [-] southernplaces7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjan22640|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malermeister|2 years ago|reply
Those two are not conflicting statements.
[+] [-] alerighi|2 years ago|reply
The excuse of reducing crime is just… an excuse
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|2 years ago|reply
What correlation is implied?
[+] [-] logicchains|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smolder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaylian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EMCymatics|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdm_blackhole|2 years ago|reply
And with this new law, we won't have to worry about Meta selling our data, the governments will take care of that.
It's looks like history seems to repeat itself. It's a just a matter of time. Social credit, the Ministry of Truth and whatever else they can think of, that's just around the corner.
But it's for the children ammaright?
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RGBCube|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]